Ejecting disks on the Mac

Ejecting disks on the Mac

If you have a removable disk in your Macintosh (examples of a removable disk are: CD-ROMs, DVDs, Zip disks, floppy disks, etc.) and you want to get it out, what do you do?

To eject a volume from a Windows PC you press the tab / button near the slot where that disk comes out and then it comes out.

On the Mac, you drag the icon of that volume on top of the Trash icon. This does not erase the contents of the volume, it will cause the Mac will eject the volume.

That's all!

Activity 1: Ejecting a volume

1) Insert a floppy disk into your Macintosh and wait a moment. An icon for the floppy disk will mount to the desktop. That will look like this:

Now that you've got it on the desktop you can copy files to it or from it, etc.

2) To get rid of the floppy disk, drag the icon on top of the trash icon. That will unmount the volume and eject the drive.

This works the same way for Zip disks, CD-ROMs, etc.

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Notes:

The Mac handles floppies and CDs and such differently than Windows: The Mac Finder (the Desktop on the Mac) is "aware" of what volumes are in various drives. The Windows system is kind of dumb about volumes in drives: it doesn't know anything is there unless you try and open it.

This is because Macintosh floppy disk drives have mechanisms inside of them that allow them to actually push the disk out of the drive.

Some newer, USB based drives for the Macintosh begin to act like Windows: you have to push a button to eject the volume after the Finder has unmounted it.

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